Mediterranean Reflections on What Went Wrong

Down the coast Ravenna is a strange place. The modern port is quite ugly or perhaps “bustling” is the better word. It is part of the muscular Italian north—smelting, petrochemicals, industrial trade—that explains why Italy is far wealthier than we usually suppose when we head to the more touristy south. If we wonder why all those quaint shops in Syracuse, Naples, Rome or Florence have nice glass, steel, and aluminum fixtures, come to Milan or Ravenna.

The city was the Byzantines’ last effort to keep Roman civilization safe a while longer from the so-called barbarians of the north. I spent the day walking alone to the city’s various churches and tombs—the great Basilica di San Vitale, the Battistero Neoniano, the little Mausoleo di Galla Placidia, and weird Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo. Ravenna was the Western capital from the late fifth to eight century, a final effort to preserve Roman culture. One can see the results in the beautiful mosaics, and octagonal and brick Byzantine church designs.

The city, like Venice, is on a lagoon, but the canals were in large part long ago covered. Other than the monuments, it is a rather depressing modern industrial city, though parts of the old inner urban core are still quite beautiful, very clean and well preserved. One gets a tinge of sadness—and warning— when entering these monumental churches, studying the mosaics that are among the best in the world. Civilization of a thousand years was collapsing, and yet somehow the old guard was able to marshal manpower and capital to created churches of enormous size, sophistication and beauty, a sort of last gasp as it were to keep art, learning and scholarship alive for yet another generation.

Our own Ravenna

Here too, there are warnings. In California we are spending hundreds of billions on prisons, in which killers and thugs sue constantly for expanded rights, while universities lay off professors (though rarely nonacademic apparatchiks and administrators), and turn away students. Ravenna invested in thousands of hours of sculpture, we in thousands of hours of legal work in appeals and writs. Our cynical intellectual elites are becoming ever more postmodern even as the undereducated majority becomes premodern.

The state spends more and more on redistributive entitlements, less and less on infrastructure. Its population is bifurcating. A small, highly taxed elite supports museums, the arts, and gives to universities, a growing underclass swarms the emergency rooms, criminal justice system, and welfare roles.

The utopianism of the shrinking elite wants the Saturday night felon to have sophisticated jurisprudence when he is arrested, the best brain surgeon when a .44 magnum enters his skull in a gang dust-up, and humane day care, health care, and counseling—and yet now has no way any longer either to pay for it, or how to convince the growing underclass to become better educated and more productive. (To do so would demand a tragic diction and mindset).

One percent of Californians pays over 40% of our income taxes, perhaps as few as 360,000 out of some 36 million in the state. Each time one of these golden gooses flies east to no-tax Nevada, we lose about $50,000-80,000 in state taxes—or the money to keep a felon in the Corcoran prison house fed, housed, medicated, and counseled for a year. Do the math: one small businessman escapes to Tahoe or Reno, one lifer has no support.

The World Outside

But the system, like Ravenna abound 500, is in collapse (so we are letting out felons onto the streets as our tax-paying elites leave). A high school teacher of history in 1950 in the Los Angeles public school system would not recognize the curriculum of today. But he would recognize parts of the 101—about the same in many places, with about 10 times the traffic.

The Ravenna effect of trying to create lasting art and beauty at the eleventh hour as the world disintegrates is harrowing to experience. Looking up at the domes of these great churches, and factoring in the engineering brilliance and artistic genius that produced them, while the entire infrastructure of Roman society was disintegrating, is again eerie. For all the vigor of the Visigoths or Lombards, or Huns, there was little there of the Roman genius for architecture, art, or engineering.

While exploring the Basilica di San Vitale today, I was reminded of the news from America. An entire nation is obsessed with the silly Henry Louis Gates affair. A supposedly premier intellectual, who is a professor of African-American grievance, gets into a spat with a cop, purportedly evokes his “mama” in slurs, warns the cop whom he is “messin’” with, and then gets affirmation from the President—and we are supposed to think this is some sort of cosmic “teachable moment” in between trying to borrow another trillion dollars to socialize medicine in the manner of the Department of Motor Vehicles?

Just as there is no logic in ruining the American medical system, so too there is no longer an elite class when its best and brightest scream slurs like “mama” and “messin’ ”, or condemn an entire police force as acting “stupidly” when it is trying to keep the rule of law.

Yes, parts of the United States are becoming like the collapsing world outside the sanctum of San Vitale.

(I’ll try to get off this Spenglerian gloom before writing from a gloomy Santa Sophia in Constantinople next week.)

65 Comments, 65 Threads

1.
Peter Boston

Emerging technologies like mini nuclear reactors, hydrogen fuel cells, ultra-sophisticated desktop fabrication and the implementation of sensible land use policies that encourage local food production will create entrepreneurial communities that can insulate themselves from the reach of an overbearing bureaucracy and the vagaries of an over managed national economy.

These communities will still have to pay the Dandegeld to the collectivists, for a while anyway, but over time the obvious economic and lifestyle advantages of individual freedom that these entrepreneurial communities will provide can change the culture.

Never in the history of mankind has there been a success story like 20th century America – for a few decades second place was so far below as to be invisible – and that amazing success instilled in us this feeling that the old rules no longer apply. We are still holding on to that feeling.

I’ve often wondered where we went wrong. We were on top of the world coming out of WWII. My own Dad was the typical story – San Jose State on the GI bill, wife and 4 kids on his salary. Camping trips to Yosemite every summer (though no plane trips of overseas vacations).

Is it that our parents wanted so bad for us to not have to work like them that they gave us too much and made things too easy? Was it the gradual distancing from church for so many of us? Or maybe the ‘success’ they achieved wasn’t really all that they had hoped it to be and the resulting frustration and unhappiness was imbibed by their children.

Americans should not be looking for a great leader. The common folk can handle their own responsibilities. Barack Obama probably is already a marginalized politician. The odds are against him ever again being a potent political force in the United States. Our loosely organized efforts have made the difference. We have the odds in our favor. The great danger may now be complacency. We must not take anything for granted.

Thank you Peter. You give me hope. Sometimes all of the negative info about our country and our world gets me down. It’s good to hear some positive thoughts about the future. Quote from the Shawshank Redemption “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things..”

I just finished reading two books on the history of the Goths, one by Thomas Burns and another by Willians & Friell. I am less partial now to the notion that Rome simply fell in the year A.D. 476. It seems to mean that the deposition of the boy king, Romulus Augustulus, was more symbolic than it was meaningful. Rome didn’t fall. The empire had, over a period of five centuries, merely evolved into something new.

The Romans lived side by side with the various Germanic tribes for nearly half a millennium. The two peoples knew each other well. They traded in peaceful times, but both sides were capable of sudden raids for the purpose of plundering their neighbors. Trajan’s campaign against the Dacians is just one of the more notorious examples. The Rhine-Danube frontier was never a firmly secure border, but rather a fluid marchland between two cultures.

The Gothic tribes had entrenched themselves firmly inside the empire proper by the end of the 4th century. Meanwhile, the Roman emperor appointed the Vandal-born Stilicho to hold the western empire together. Just as Roman emperors had previously hired German mercenaries for their personal bodyguard, Stilicho relied on a Hunnic contingent for the same purpose. By the 5th century the western empire had become a patchwork of Roman towns and villas intermingled with rural Germanic settlements. The template would become a pattern for the early medieval kingdoms soon to emerge.

Are the churches of Ravenna merely the last gasp by a decrepit empire to display its glory? Or does it indicate that the church had emerged as a new power on the stage of history? Roman state power had always been based on her legions and the wealth of an aristocratic elite. Roman religion never had the status that the Catholic church would soon enjoy in a medieval Europe.

I don’t believe America is about to fall. But like the Romans, the United States is most definitely evolving into something new. Our southern border is no more secure today than was the Rhine-Danube frontier for the Romans. And like the Romans we are suffering demographic pressures from beyond the border that simply defy solution.

These communities will still have to pay the Dandegeld to the collectivists, for a while anyway, but over time the obvious economic and lifestyle advantages of individual freedom that these entrepreneurial communities will provide can change the culture.

Unless the collectivist hordes decide to just kill the goose in order to get whatever gold they can. I really see some dangerous times coming. Do you imagine any of our nominal elites willingly giving up their fantasies?

There are still plenty of Americans who get educated and are productive. I think a far greater problem is the well-off elite (some from this group) who are crushing our ability to innovate or even continue our standard of living.

They do this in the name of Gaia, their Goddess. They ban drilling. They ban coal mining. The just put off limits 1,000,000 acres of the best uranium mining country in the US. They bad nuclear power. They ban coal power. And, they ban disagreement.

If America fades, these people will be the cause.

Oh, and they also happen to be the folks in charge of our educational systems.

Bu I wonder … as taxation creeps up to and beyond the 50% mark, what will be the consequences? How many people will “de-facto John Gault,” and withdraw from full participation in a new economy that lessens reward for labor and risk? It isn’t just a new moral fiber that will matter, it’s the dollars and sense consequences of debt and re-distribution. Facts, if you will.

Couldn’t agree with you more Doc, on the need to turn our education systems around.

Our Best Next Generation are over fighting for us in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else we have them deployed.

They are only 1% though. It is the others who will drag us down.

Our education system, with legal, personal, and criminal attacks against teachers from any number of threats are keeping many good potential teachers from entering the fray, and regretfully, many men who might assist in fighting the good fght in the classrooms.

Professor, the inmates aren’t the only problem in the astonishingly expensive California State Prisons. The pampered apparatchiks and administrators you have described in the university system also exist in the prison system. There are also some conscientious administrators here and there and many more who would be conscientious under different circumstances.

Taxpayers are also supporting legions of woefully unqualified, under-performing, often haughty and sometimes vicious employees at levels high and low – because they have the right friends and relatives. Unions are beside the point when employees organize to protect their mutual interests vertically as well as laterally. They sometimes organize into “gangs” which mirror to some extent largely race-based inmate gangs, invoking racialist sentiments to get what they want.

They sometimes treat employees without similar connections as their personal serfs or as obstacles to hiring more friends and relatives. I’m not talking about correctional officers here. That’s a whole different topic.

Some of the money funneled into the prisons is rather casually funneled right out again in mundane ways – vehicles and equipment earmarked for friends and relatives in the private sector, outside contracts given to friends, etc. And any complaints or reports of malfeasance seem to go directly back to the prison in question.

Sometimes wardens (who are regularly moved from institution to institution) are “protected” from details about malfeasance by subordinates with all the right connections, who are not subject to the scrutiny which wardens undergo. Some people who are repeatedly disciplined for malfeasance (both financial and related to interpersonal relationships) are repeatedly promoted. This leads to cynicism among other employees.

It’s hard to lessen corruption or effect meaningful changes under these conditions. The pathologies run deep. A reliable supply of taxpayer money promotes an unhealthy sense of security. Periodically there is a big scandal and everything falls apart. For a while.

Some minor corrections. Gangs do not use .44 Magnums, the guns are too heavy and costly, and the ammo too expensive. Throw away Makarovs using 9X18 Makarov are preferred. The thug who murdered Ennis Cosby (a Romanian immigrant who joined a gang) used just such a weapon.

Next, China is no world-beater. It is best by racial and religious tension, including Islamic fundamentalism, on a wide scale in the West and nationwide among the Hui. China has a massive peasant class that is mostly illiterate (still) and poverty stricken and restive. It is also as Mark Steyn points out, getting old before it gets rich. Recently Chinese authorities ditched the one child rule.

Dr. Hansen you have made your point and made it very well. We Westerners have spoiled our young rotten, dumbed down their education to the point where illiteracy and innumeracy seem to be endemic, infantilized our adult citizenry with a nanny government, and provided some excellent historic examples of how and why effective, productive, and profitable cities and states eventually decayed and ultimately declined.
However you failed to mention Imperial Roman and how it embodied every one of the failures you mentioned. Perhaps most importantly Rome overly protected her citizens from both economic and military hardship to the point where it’s collapse and conquest was inevitable. As I am sure you know, Imperial Rome started subsidizing it’s free tradesmen as it began to import more and more of it’s necessities from the provinces it conquered, and that ultimately it’s free tradesmen decided to live off the subsidy rather than even try to compete with the cheaper imports. Thus rather than work, the Imperial Roman citizen spent his time destroying his human spirit by attending the gruesome and cruel Coliseum Gladiatorial Games. And as you also know, the burden of paying off these unproductive Roman citizens fell on the shoulders of the wealthy and powerful Roman rulers and patricians who were taxed to the breaking point. This is where the West has chosen to arrive and the election of Barack Hussein Obama and his nanny state health care and universal entitlements is the method by which the West has chosen to travel to that destination. May God help us!

#1 Boston – I disagree. The collectivists will drag down the entrepreneurial communities. They now control the info stream: education; media; and increasingly, the courts.

The problem is that these collectivists ruin the economy of the areas where they predominate. After they have begun to ruin the local economy, they relocate to other, more-prosperous areas. They continue to vote the same way, thus dragging down the new area. It never occurs to them to think that the reason they must uproot is their voting habits.

Until we change the voting requirements, this will continue. It should be restricted to something like those who own their own homes, and military vets, and the like. Else the parasites will always multiply faster than the hosts, thus destroying the hosts.

How could you be anything else but Spenglerian. You are a classical scholar, erudie and civilised. You choose to voice your thoughts publicly. The only way you will have peace is by retiring to a very private life and attend to your garden and books. That’s what Cicero should have done and then he might have lived to a ripe old age.

Your one solace must be that you will be proved right. No doubt of it.

Doc, you once again illuminate our world by drawing lessons from the past.

I am very much of two minds re: the future. The staggering brilliance of our technological acheivements set against the thuggish stupidity of redistributionist social policies. In my veiw this can play out two ways; the thuggish take over the technology for their evil purposes (this leads to a world that slips into a hellish darkness), or we pass through the fire of socialsim and emerge sadder but wiser and use the technology to further advance our republic.

Yet we are still an enterprising, basically center-right population. If the news media weren’t covering for the left, and were reporting all the news, things would be different. The PJM crowd keeps up with the news, but who among the rest of the people are aware of

1. The IG scandals

2. The Black Panther voter intimidation and dropping of charges by the Obama administration.

3. The leftist rot in our universities

4 Obama’s push to install Zeyala despite the his entirely legal and constitutional removal by the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress.

And the list goes on.

Tell this population all the news, instead of the filtered propaganda they now get, and things would be different. I would like to see an association between the local TV stations and newspapers, and PJM. Let the local news broadcasts expand to cover national and international news. Let the local TV stations and newspapers interact, so the most important stories from the nightly news are expanded and analyzed in the following morning paper. Put Michael Totten, Michael Yon, Bill Roggio and Professor Hansen in kitchens and living rooms across the country. Does PJM have something like this in mind? Does the AP’s decision to restrict fair use provide an opening? I’d like to think so.

As usual, thank you VDH, for your usual contextual article. I’m only sorry you’re starting to share my general funk.
Both you and poster Boston intimate what I have felt for some time. We as a country, will divide. There is no way the haves can continue to supply the wants.
Whether it is by city, territory, state or region can’t be known, but it will happen.
I only wish that one millennium from now I could read the history of this formerly great civilization.

One of the things that fascinate me is how historians interpret the fall of Rome. The ideas seem to cycle and are in large part reflections of their own time and society. The idea that Rome just peacefully changed has been very popular for some 30 years and is still gospel in most university settings. There has been a sea change in the last 5 years however, back to a fall to a lesser, poorer place, especially for the poor. Read How Rome Fell by Goldsworthy for an example.

How does the (long winded) paragraph above relate here? Current thought seems to be that Rome died the death of 1000 cuts. Many small and large changes made, often seemingly for good reasons that slowly changed Rome and inhibited its ability to defend itself and maintain safety and peace for its citizens.

This is the view that makes the most sense to me and it also looks very much like America today. I see many small and large changes that are slowly dragging the country down.

Also yes, Rome fell and the poor were the worst victims. Even small farms during the height of Rome might have tile roofs, wooden or tile floors, fine dishware and other small luxuries. After the end of Rome similar small farms had thatched roofs and dirt floors and nothing much in the way of luxuries.

My money would be on the state sovereignty 10th Amendment push currently underway. With power and taxes devolved to the state level, some states will prosper and some will fail to mend their foolish ways. It wouldn’t quite be regional, but I can see like-minded states (like Oklahoma and Texas) cooperating in various ways.

Nation focuses on choice of beer at the non-event “Beer Summit” while the beast called Healthcare Reform is somehow making its way closer to a vote in the house. It is almost like we need our gladiatorial distractions because no one can fathom just how big the reform is – just like no one can explain where all the money from the boondoggle stimulus package went. The government breaks everything it touches – somehow it is a historical lesson we never learn.

How could a “basically center-right population” elect such an imbecillic, leftist government to represent us? I am coming to the belief that the best and brightest American capitalists, in pursuit of prosperity and wealth, have (by default) allowed the non-productive, elitist left to stealthily conquer and occupy our public education systems, universities, news media, legislative bodies, courts, and now our presidency. While busilly engaged in the business of business, leftist busybodies have, right under our noses, replaced public education with socialist indoctrination, turned our universities into “Hate America” centers, twisted our Christian heritage into multiculturist-based moral relativism, replaced science with agenda-driven and baseless environmentalist drivel, relegated our media into a mindless version of Pravda/Izvestia and dismissed our Constitutional Republican government into an abject oligarchy dominated by fools. How would the Founding Fathers view, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Henry Waxman, Maxine Waters and Barak Obama? I shudder to think. I don’t know about you, but I am deeply ashamed to be represented by a government that is in the process of advancing legislation that would provide cradle-to-grave healthcare to illegal aliens while encouraging our elderly parents and grandparents to consider suicide in lieu of medical treatment. The government we have elected is a disgrace to our citizenry and to our American heritage. It is time to openly display your outrage and begin the process of taking our nation back from those who have stolen it.

Its all too smug to convince our selves that everything is going to hell and here’s how it will all end.
That’s baloney. Not one person on this earth can tell us what will happen next week. Yet here we all are telling each other , oh yeah,thats whats going to happen. Nonsense , trends have a habit of behaving like the smoke from a cigarette.
On close observation , the smoke flows upward in a smooth steady column ( laminar flow)and we are led to say , yes we believe this is how a warm,rising stream of gas behaves and we can predict this is how it will continue.But it doesn’t.
I don’t think the future is knowable . Even to the extent that it could all collapse tomorrow.
Reading tea leaves in Venice on a paid holiday must be fun , but its not the basis for planning the future.

Please don’t savage Constantinople too hard, after getting a chance to study 5th Cent. Greece and Komnenian Byzantium in Oxford I had to see both up close. (Istanbul took the luck of the draw.) Although, I can see the same theme running through the end of that period in regards to lavish spending, rising taxes, eventual debasement of the coinage and massive debt.

Thanks for “Who Killed Homer?” it really kindled a latent desire I’ve always had for the study of the classics.

“Unless we return to a meritocracy, emphasize science, math, liberal arts, and engineering—rather than the plague of ‘studies’ courses (as in environmental-, leisure-, gender-, Latino-, black-, Asia-, Chicano-, community-, feminist-studies, etc.)—we simply will not match the Chinese and Indians in this century.”

I’m not so sure about the “Chinese” part of this assertion. The Chinese have an oppressive communist government that curtails the freedoms of the populace like all non-democracies do. I think the Chinese have a glass ceiling and until they become a democracy, they’re going to maintain that glass ceiling.

I was in China a few years ago with my father and up until then he had thought that the Chinese were going to eventually “take our lunch.” After being there for 3 weeks though, he changed his tune. He thought that they were too superstitious to overtake America as the pre-eminent power.

I too am dismayed be the rise of progressivism in this country and the resulting damage it is doing. It needs to be reversed somehow. But I think the Chinese will always be inferior to us unless they become politically democratic.

Cheer up, people. We’re going thru a cycle, reaping the fruits of our sowing.. The leftist agenda is falling apart. The fool in the White House is becoming a one term disaster. The coming economic collapse will provide remedial education in how things really work. This is the USA, we will be back, a little bruised but wiser for it.

Nothing continues as it is forever. Not the current conditions and not the long term conditions.

We can look at what has worked in history and what has worked for us then look at what hasn’t worked in history and what hasn’t or isn’t working for us. To make policy, to vote with only feelings and not intellect is now and has always been a recipe for disaster.

An almost perfect encapsulation of all that is wrong with our Republic. Unfortunately I must totally disagree with your last sentence. Entropy cannot be reversed. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics dictates that the slide into Mad-Max territory where the entire US approaches the look of Camden, N.J. or E.St. Louis, Ill., is, unfortunately, irreversible. Until the next Big-Bang, that is….

(Historical note: E. St. Louis was not ALWAYS
a basket-case. As recently as 1960 it was declared/certified as an “All-American City.”
by the National Civic League as one of America’s top 10 cities in livability–but back then it’s racial demographics were quite, shall we say, un-PC “different”– “Embarrassingly White” as one “progressive” once described it. )

1. PB Etech > Insulated Entrepreneurial Communities…
Whose citizens take an “Oath of Fealty” to their town,
and _will_ have to defend it against mortal enemies.

2. MW Rainy, rainy day…
We are in this mess because, since the end of WWII,
we have had no real competition to enforce social or
economic discipline; We did not go wrong, we went soft.
But now, “Mr. Hamadryad” is in town; Hard rain falling.

4. DT We don’t need another hero…
We need people to Lead, Follow, or get the Hell
out of the way, while the US is rebuilding its
manufacturing economy, from the Grassroots up;
Politics is an evil, necessary to get the Statists
out of the way.

7. ~P Gothic Romance “Against the Fall of Night”
The time scales differ; The US can recover from 50 years
of corrosive, unearned prosperity; After centuries of
decline, “The Romans were unable to stand on their own
two feet, and were supinely aware of the fact”. :)
P.S. There is no long view; Win or Die by ~ 2012.

8. JMH @ 1. PB
If you once pay the Danegeld,
you will never get rid of the Dane.
Or, in this case, the Community Organizer.
That is why PB’s towns need to be the smallest
self-sufficient modular units that Etech can provide;
Most will survive the coming Crash, and rebuild a
Meritocracy in which voting is a privilege, not a right.

10. BVW Ravenna, the Rubicon, and Caesar as Wotan
Could be: Ask a Pictish peasant who built the Roman
ruins in Britain, and he would answer “The Gods”.

14. W China is no world beater
but it still knows how to passify peasants, permanently.
Good practice for its colonization of Africa. :(

My admiration, Mr. Hanson. You understood and described in few words the main differences between this part of Italy and the South of my country.
About the sinergy of republican virtues and capitalism, You can see such allegory in the Room of the Council of Ten, in Doge’s Palace, in Venice.

VDH: Unless we return to a meritocracy, emphasize science, math, liberal arts, and engineering—rather than the plague of ‘studies’ courses (as in environmental-, leisure-, gender-, Latino-, black-, Asia-, Chicano-, community-, feminist-studies, etc.)—we simply will not match the Chinese and Indians in this century.

Ritchie Emmons, #32: I’m not so sure about the “Chinese” part of this assertion.

And I’m not so sure about the “Indian” part either. We may have a porous border with a troublesome next-door neighbor, but India’s counterpart neighbor Pakistan makes Mexico look like a model of law, order and sane and sober governance in comparison. And Mexico doesn’t have nukes with our names on them, either. Not to mention that India sits smack-dab in the middle of one of the most natural-disaster-prone parts of the world. Picking up the pieces after every earthquake, tsunami, typhoon etc. is a considerable drag on any economy – especially if one of its main drivers, say, the hi-tech industries of Bangalore, happens to get hit hard.

With power and taxes devolved to the state level, some states will prosper and some will fail to mend their foolish ways.
If the “progressives” have their way, this will never be allowed to happen. That’s why they want everything to be set by the Feds–if you make it local the lab rats can flee out of the jurisdiction. Remember school busing? That attempt at social engineering resulted in the white middle class fleeing a lot of the big cities, leaving them to rot.

No “progressive” agenda can ever be expected to succeed if the lab rats (the citizens) are not properly caged. As the Soviets knew, a “progressive” regime must NEVER EVER allow people to vote with their feet, or that “progressive” regime will crumble into dust.

Speaking of the rough and competent Chinese – drug trafficking may cost you your life in that country. China’s drug problem is minimal compared to the US. What do we do in California? We talk about legalizing certain drugs. Nevada looks better all the time. Who wants to jockey on The 101 with a bunch of texting potheads? Seems like we are headed in the wrong direction…

Interesting, eclectic comments on this thread today. Who ever it was managed to read Burns’ history of the Goths — kudos. I was bored to tears by his writing style.

Not much to add to VDH’s article, other than I wish I was on that cruise.

29. Boca Condo King:

It’s that new-fangled math they teach, devoid of either logic or applicability. Forty years ago your average kid with a lemonade stand or paper route could figure the exact change for a fiver in his head. Nowadays, giving young people extra pennies to round off the change just confuses the poor dumb bastards, ruining their self-esteem, and thereby undoing the work of countless committed/communist educators who devoted their lives to making America’s young’uns the most confident poor dumb bastards in the history of the world. So, it’s probably not worth the effort.

The USA of 2009 is reminiscent of the France of 1788. Both countries were misruled into near-bankruptcy by an out-of-touch, untaxed aristocracy far more noteworthy for breeding than for intelligence. And the most productive citizens, the professionals and skilled craftsmen, paid the bills – but had no voice in policy.

In France, this ended in the aristocracy being deposed – and those who did not flee the country were executed.

In the United States? I don’t know. But the record sales of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ portends a possible strike by the professionals – and that will completely break the Ivy League Snotties. Certainly many engineers detest the existing order with every fiber of our beings – like the French professionals, we’re sick of being relied on to solve problems, then kicked in the teeth socially. We’re ready to pull the plug. They have NO ability to replace the plug after we pull it.

Interesting, eclectic comments on this thread today. Who ever it was managed to read Burns’ history of the Goths — kudos. I was bored to tears by his writing style.

Not much to add to VDH’s article, other than I wish I was on that cruise.

29. Boca Condo King:

It’s that new-fangled math they teach, devoid of either logic or applicability. Forty years ago your average kid with a lemonade stand or paper route could figure the exact change for a fiver in five seconds, without a calculator. Nowadays, giving young people extra pennies to round off the change just confuses the poor dumb bastards, thereby ruining their self-esteem, and undoing the work of countless committed/communist educators who devoted their lives to making America’s publically schooled young’uns the most confident poor dumb bastards in the history of the world. So, though it’s only pennies, like their expensive educations it’s not worth the money, or the effort on your part.

Mr Hanson is gloomy because he recognizes decline when he sees it.
For a modern nation, decline means that its people:

- are less competent than they used to be;
- are less well educated than they used to be;
- can no longer discriminate between important and trivial things;
- are depleting, instead of building, the nation’s wealth;
- tend to think that life is an extended picnic;
- have lost the intestinal fortitude required to turn things around;
- can’t match the capabilities of people in other nations;

and so on and so on.

People have to look after themselves by making sure that my list of the symptoms of decline does not apply to them and their family. I don’t think that you can look outward to general society for help. Each person must look inward and be self reliant. You have to think and behave like old time immigrants to survive.

Having seen the TV program “The View” (spit), I don’t know if 21st century Americans can do that.

A Metaphor: The host is losing its life to the diease and there are no doctors left, no functional defense against the slow death caused by an invading parasite. Only pain and suffering.

Demonstrable competence in survival will be needed by American individuals and families with the continuing collapse of the Democratic Republic of America and free market Capitalism that is now going past the point of being able to function at all.

Obama’s “vision” of America will no longer support you as you produce. It will hinder you and take from you. You will not have access to the capital that will disappear due to taxes. You will be guided by government mandates and rules to enforce the “social policy” and collect tax and fees. If you are part of the power structure you can skim millions but it will not produce anything. It you get money it will be from a government handout due to your toeing the line as dictated by government policy.

Trade in your Clunker, give away your freedoms. You can’t have that car but this one. You can only buy a car with this handout. Nothing else. You can’t have that treatment-you are over 55.

Those “Americans” (parasites) that are now clamoring to feed off the productive taxed few with revenue disbursed through the federal government apparatus will perish first. Why? Because Obama and his words are simply the manifestation of an indoctrinated ventriloquist doll acting as the Judas Goat. His words are subversive lies to move you and your ignorance on the chess board where he wants you. Grasping and needy willing to vote as dictated to.

Why are you so ignorant? Why is it so easy to fool you? Don’t you know how real permanent jobs are created? Why does a Kate Couric exist, idiot MSM reporters, a Charley Rangel, a Dick Durbin, a Nancy Pelosi,or a John Conyers who can’t read, a Harry Reid, an Obama? why do they now lead America? Why are you a victim?

Obama’s words at their core are nothing but subversive rants and the product of the indoctrination process received in the AA and PC pipeline of Anti Americanism. No merit here.

Obama is simply a manifestation of this parasite infestation of communism perfumed as liberalism that is now large enough to kill the host, America. That was its original purpose. Unfortunately for the USSR communism killed the USSR first. Communist subversion and Utopian language designed to create Parasites was planted however in America.

This anti American progress of subversion veiled in Utopian words and abject ignorance having the one single ability to seek power owns the MSM, Congress, the POTUS, and the Supreme Court. How is that for progress America?

It owns Americans who have been turned into parasites due to being indoctrinated into believing they are dependent on government power to survive. A result of class and race warfare that has been very successful for it’s acolytes.

Eventually the individual men and women of the Military will have to begin to ask themselves what do we do? This ongoing destruction of the founding father’s America is not constitutional and the individual Soldiers in all services were sworn in to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States of America from its enemies both foreign and domestic. A great phrase put in by wise men.

What a dilemma America. What and how tragic will this situation become or be?

This destruction of America is occurring only by the use of words, promises, vote stealing, ignorance, ballot stuffing and is nothing but the virulent and destructive scorpion of communism perfumed by Utopian ideas and language that has never worked in the real world. Millions were killed in the last 100 years by the power structures to just try to make it work after bloody revolutions and communism (Utopia) was in power.

This destruction of America only makes sense to Academic Armchair thinkers where all other conditions are held static by the “thinker” better known as an idiot professor. Gates being the perfect example. Gates is a combination professor, racist, and flim flam man, whose expertise is in extorting easily a salary from Harvard a hot bed of this subversive infestation.

Harvard is like the local Acorn organization, but worse because they are veiled as a University. They want AA and PC government money so they dance and play the tune needed. Not smart enough to recognize the eventual end result. Seeding America with brain dead “leaders”and subversive Manchurian idiots.

This demonstrable lie and subversion has taken its parasitic hold and has been growing in America since the early part of the last century and its power exists primarily in the weak Utopian academics, the Universities, in Union leadership establishing power and self dealing corruption, crony capitalist and quasi government companies, and large central inner cites that have become the hot bed of crime and corruption dominated by criminal and subversive organizations like Acorn, teachers Unions, Prostitution, Drugs, Klepto Black and White “Democrat” mayors and the Democrat party along with the Unions.

This static grip not allowing resolution and human progress occurs and exists simply to insure the power grab stays in place by simply stuffing ballot boxes and maintaining the destructive status quo even among competing organizations. There is enough corrupt money to go around. These crime ridden dysfunctional cities are huge population centers that swing voting results for entire states warping the electoral vote process. Not that many illegal votes are needed.

How can this exist in America? Wake up Americans. Just take one example of many. Has Acorn been punished? Have they even been “reined in”, locals have testified to their criminal activities. Acorn personal were indoctrinated and trained by Obama in Chicago. Democratic Party Politicians have refused to investigate.

Acorn was given millions in the “new” stimulus hoax that also fed millions into the Unions, and crony capitalism while at the same time taking control of a large segment of American Industry,and in doing so voiding and destroying American citizen’s legal investor rights. Investors who loaned capital using legal agreements, wiped out in favor of Unions who are simply feeding off the now government supported companies.

Still Don’t believe what is happening then think about this. Everyone who lives in a city knows where they cannot go if they value their safety. Why is that America? If there is a dangerous neighborhood why does it stay dangerous. Everyone knows its there.

In the Early part of the century this fear of neighborhoods did not exist. That was true for blacks and whites. What changed it America? Why does it appear unsolvable with all of the “Utopian words” (subversion) addressed to correct it?

This subversive prescription, the medicine is the poison and the parasite! It is making the problem worse. Look at any “metric” you like. Can you add 2 and 2? The MSM veils and hides this by their ignorance and stupidity this becoming “useful” idiots of the ongoing destruction of America. Even the USSR leadership recognized this early on and called them “Useful Idiots”.

Obama’s words being spouted from this well spring of demonstrated class warfare and human enslavement are designed to produce a veiled view of the world. This is needed for its believers in a class warfare indoctrination to create dependency and fear among a divided and grouped population and thus the need for a dictatorship of power centralized in the few supreme leadership groups, cults and parasites.

It all depends on Americans as to the final outcome. True Americans will survive this destruction, they built the country in the first place. They can do it again. Parasites will not survive they simply killed the host and will die.

Unless we return to a meritocracy, emphasize science, math, liberal arts, and engineering—rather than the plague of ‘studies’ courses (as in environmental-, leisure-, gender-, Latino-, black-, Asia-, Chicano-, community-, feminist-studies, etc.)—we simply will not match the Chinese and Indians in this century.

I confess, I never understood what one does with a “studies” degree. Most of the arts have clear applications. Each of the sciences has a very obvious application. But what do “-studies” give the student? It rarely ever appears to be knowledge (as opposed to doctrines and dogmas). They get a sheepskin that says they’ve earned a 4-year degree presumably… but what else? Why would I ever want to hire or work for someone who specialized for years by marinating in identity politics and other fashionable causes? As opposed to preparing to do something useful with their life?

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“It is as though the left, in finally coming to grips during the 1990s that social engineering was a failure, determined to ban all other forms thereof via ‘Green’ policies.”

This line, and I wish I could recall to whom it should be attributed, seems to sum up both the public mentality toward advancing the sciences – and the scientists’ frustrations at being told they cannot now produce. When we change that, then we’re on our way to recovery as a nation.

Ah Venice. I was in Venice the other day too. Too bad I didn’t bump into prof. Hanson.

Venetians invented the factory assembly line at least 4 centuries before H. Ford did. By the time of Lepanto they had already perfected the big battle ship assembly line at the “arsenale” (they city’s ship yard) to the point that it could put out 6 battle ships a week (if they rested on sunday that is one a day!). It really is too bad for Italy’s history that Venice did not understand what was happening to the world merchant patterns and then manage to invent a way to remain competitive

#1 Peter Boston: “Emerging technologies like mini nuclear reactors, hydrogen fuel cells, ultra-sophisticated desktop fabrication and the implementation of sensible land use policies that encourage local food production will create entrepreneurial communities …”

I’d like to agree. Going Galt in small utopian communities in Montana, Colorado, New Zealand, etc., really appeals. However, such communities will become the Blackfoot, Arapaho and Pueblo to the barbaric nomads like the Sioux, Apache and Comanche: surviving from attack to attack only to lose all their corn to the marauders.

the demise of the roman empire brought on by multiculturism and the roman elites exclusion of everything not Roman, and their sense of entitlement. its not who assimilates but how. its sad that we as Americans are bound and determined to repeat history. i guess i am glad that there were some good emperors. so which one is the big O? Caligula or Nero?

I am SO glad I left CA 3 years ago, thereby avoiding the inevitable fruits of collectivism/progressivism. It sure would be nice if one could move between countries as easily as an American can move from state to state… get a little competition going between ideologies on the national level, not just the state level.

Thanks for what you do, Professor. If it weren’t for the freedom of speech provided in the alternative media / internet, I would feel much more marginalized and isolated.

As the professor knows from his historical understanding, America has been heading down the road of history for a long time. Yes we are repeating the lessons of history because we failed to learn them. Were we not warned? Of course we were! Pastors, preachers, politicians, all have warned us but no one listened, at least not enough, so we are repeating the repeated. The governments of man cannot stand and have always been destined to fail, as soon as they forget the pit from which they were dug, they spiral downward in their darkness, unable to see the error of their ways. No government apart from God has ever succeeded and are not allowed to stand for long in their apostacy. so while we are in freefall the King of the heavens is raising up the next and final government the Earth will ever see. His! As promised and on time as usual. Will the the nations of the world like it? No! The pain of birth is traumatic at the least but we are promised it will happen fast and we appear to be on tne fast track now. So be it.

the USA spends too much on the military & related defense spending stuff, no one seems ready to admit this and cut the crap. if we are realistic about the budget and deficit then we need to pull back our world military presence. the problems we face did not start with this presidency, and will not be easy to change, we must accommodate ourselves to reality, we need real change not band-aids or pointing fingers.

I’ve been reading your musings for the last year and have found them thought-provoking and insightful albeit a bit dark. I enjoy your references to western history and since I’ve been living outside the United States for several years now in both Spain and England. I’ve been mesmerized watching current events unfold with singular fascination.
Given the quantity of the legislation that has passed or will soon pass, it will be interesting to see how events unfold. Will Americans jettison their characteristic self-reliance and adopt the European mentality of get as much from the system while hiding what you have? This administration is poll-driven and the only reason why the Healthcare legislation was delayed is due to the downward slide in the polls. He has done a very good job in shaping the message and I think that Gates-Gate was the perfect red herring to get the public to focus their attention on something other than the re-making of the Health system
Finally, until the mainstream media turns a critical eye on the administration and starts calling them to task on some of the more objectionable actions you won’t see a change in behavior.

I’m going Galt. My wife and I make ~$200k. In December she’s quitting and reducing ouor salary income to less than half of what it is today. We’ve paid off our cars and downsized our home. We’ve decided to not pay for the welfare state any more than we have to. With our new income I hope to be below whatever level that the socialists are going to whack with new taxes. I plan to get very involved with the states rights movement.

Hope someone is still reading this thread. Toady I found an old newpaper article that I had saved. Hanson’s comments about Venice made me look for it. The article tells that back in 1504 the venetians studied the possibiity of opening the Suez canal to be able compete with the portuguese! They actually sent an embassy to the Sultan of Egypt to propose the idea. As it turned out nothing came of it because the sultan was afraid to piss the Turks. he was not paranoid. Undeed in 1517 the turks annexed Egypt!

In case anyone is interested the article was published August 5th 2004 in the italian newspaper Il CORRIERE DELLA SERA, author Beppe Gullino.

“For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from truth and turn aside to myths”

— 2 Timothy 4:3-4.

I can’t recall who first brought those verses to my attention, but I find them very pertinent to our present habit of finding new and often conflicting versions of truth in “studies”.

We are just returned from Venice and had been there the same week as you. I remarked to my family that this was the worst crowding I have seen in Venice since I began visiting there, beginning in 1966. It didn’t help that much space was taken up by the Leonard Cohen concert stage and seating and the barriers for the repair work to the Campanile.

I also remarked that despite our motor boatman saying business was down 40%, it just couldn’t be the case, given the hordes of tourists, including Italian ones.

Anyway, besides Garry Wills in his book on his beloved Venice you did a good job explaining the decline of the Serene Republic, let alone Napoleon and his campaign against the ancient churches. We also revisited Pisa; would that Galileo had encouraged the Pisans to dredge their port before it silted up.

Finally, I am glad the PJM moderators have instituted guidelines, but there ought to be a log-in requirement with IP addresses recorded.